I'm all BANG BANG HRUUMP WOOSH BANG BANG SHLIK MRPH BANG BANG BANG BANG ZVVVIT PTWOO BANG BANG BANG DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA SHLIK FTCHK BAM BAM BAM BAM THTUNK PTWOOOW BADDA BADDA BADDA POW POW BING ZING ZAP WOOP WHAM

When suddenly 'plz insrt disc 2 lol'



At first I panicked thinking perhaps I left the machine before it spat out the second disc, but nope, redbox.com confirms the 360 version only has disc 1.

Sonofabitch.

I just rediscovered a dance style called shuffle. From what I can tell, they never refer to it as 'shuffling' but then again not many that did the hustle actually partook in hustling.

I saw some people from eastern Europe ... or maybe Sweden or Finland doing this dance a year or so ago. I thought it was just some weird Euro techno rave thing.

Nope apparently it's big in my home city of Melbourne too, the most popular video for 'shuffle' being this video (loud sound)

Sometimes it looks like they're trying to put out a fire on their back without touching the ground because it's on fire too. Sometimes it looks like sped-up footage of a drunk stumbling, sorry, shuffling about. Sometimes it looks like they have a stone in their shoe they're trying to shake out.

Not that I can talk of course. I dance stupid too, and not nearly as good as they do. S'why I don't dance in public. Or when anyone is watching.

As I mentioned in a recent journal, I've finally broken down the mental barriers and begun uploading stuff from my 'out tray'.

What happened to me was that the longer I'd been on dA the more selective I was about what I'd submit. I'd also somehow got it in my head that I shouldn't submit too many things close together.

That didn't turn out to be very healthy. I ended up with a massive backlog, and it kinda scared me off from making new stuff until I uploaded what I had. Stupid stupid stupid.

So as part of my reboot I've been submitting three deviations a day until my out tray is cleared. Not all of them are epic, but it's a good feeling to finally be comfortable with that again.

The other day it came up in conversation that double words in sentences are kinda goofy - stuff like 'had had'. Is it grammatically correct? Maybe. Can the sentence be rephrased to avoid it? Of course.

I forgot to look it up until reading an article just now (The Pirahae people who define happiness without god) which contained 'that that'.

That was enough of that, I thought to myself, so I looked it up... and it pretty much confirms what I already thought (guess I haven't gotten that stupid after all.)

Check out when are double words ok?, which you can listen to with the little orange player at the top, or just read like normal. WHATEVS.

Get it? Umbra, shadow, thespook? No? No one speak Latin any more?



Back to seriousness though.

I made my account on August 2001; I've been here for over ten years now. For around maybe seven years it was hard to imagine going more than a day or two without logging in to check my messages and keep up with friends. It was hard to imagine myself losing the drive to create, too.

But it happened. Probably life related stuff that was more important - and the more it happened the easier it became.

My last journal was three months ago, the one before that separated by another four months or something. The last time I uploaded a deviation was June 2011. My Vintage Journal CSS has had broken images for months now.

Stuff I used to obsess over just doesn't evoke anything in me any more. It's not a depression thing, or an artist's block kinda feeling... it's just a general sort of apathy. So that's been the elephant in the room - I burnt out I guess.

It's at the point now though that it's been so long that I don't feel the things that burnt me out. I'm a blank state now, just running on auto pilot. So lets see. Maybe I'll just batch upload the stuff I've been sitting on (I've got photos in my out tray from 2007 ) and get it out of the way so I can see what I want to 'be' now.

It's 3AM-ish. I felt like writing a journal... but if I started writing about everything I have worth writing about it'd keep me up too long. So I'm just checking in. Sup? SUUUP?

watch this.

Quick journal to thank everyone that wished me a happy birthday. Thanks guys

Last five days or so have been pretty crazy.

On the 18th a bowl shattered while Nadia was rinsing it, giving her a nasty cut on her pinky. I was talking to a friend on Skype when there was a sound of something smashing and Nadia called out that something bad had happened.

Her exact words went something like "err, Nick!? um, something bad just happened."



When I got to her it hadn't started bleeding yet, but within seconds it was gushing. I worked fast, and maybe 30 seconds later I'd stopped the bleeding with a bandaid and slid a digit from a rubber glove over her finger to protect it while we went to the emergency room.

A few hours later, and she had three stitches put in.

Two days later it's my birthday, and also Nadia's older sister's wedding day. Nothing fancy, just a civil service and then dinner at a restaurant. Joke was that I'd have a 'pizza' cake for my birthday, but they had neither pizza nor cake on the menu. Cinnamon donut stick things it is!  

On Monday I got Shadows of the Damned in the mail from Gamefly. Enjoyable, nothing to complain about so far. Combat is a lot like Resident Evil 4, which I later found out might have something to do with Shinji Mikami (creator of Resident Evil series) being involved in the making of the game.

Then, yesterday, don't know if you've heard the news yet or not, but HOLY FUCKING SHIT EARTHQUAKE IN VIRGINIA ! Kinda fun to get woken up by an earthquake actually.

---

anyhoo. sup?

My brother from another mother gifted me a game called E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy on Steam. We completed it in co-op, and while it has a number of annoying bugs, I'm enjoying it.

He went full psi (magic) and I balanced weapon skill, stealth and hacking. If you play/grind long enough though, you can max everything out and become all powerful - which I did - but there are a few weapons and upgrades I can't get because I don't have the required research completed.

To do research you need to kill enemies, who will randomly drop a random item you can research. Most of the time when they do drop something, you've already got it, but if you don't you can spend money to research it, which then takes a variable amount of actual time.

Basically, it's a pain in the ass.

I spent hours over a couple of days trying to find new research items the proper way and found nothing new, so I cheated. There is some fun to be had in playing an RPG and levelling you character, working towards getting some cool item or whatever. But when a game uses random drops as the means of getting something valuable and sought after... fuck that, it's not a game to me any more.

It could have taken me days to find all those damned research items, and then I'd have to dump money and ACTUAL TIME into getting the shit researched. I've already 'finished' the game, I just want to play with some of the toys I've been locked out from.

Anyway, that thought fresh in my mind, I was browsing reddit this morning when I came across this gem: The happiest day this kid will ever experience.

I couldn't do that and feel satisfaction.

ELEVEN

Back in March I wrote about how we couldn't find any alcohol swabs in stores because of a recall. Well, we've got some now. Anyone else want some?

Here's the story:

Our local pharmacy had some behind the counter, but as they were more expensive than the others we only got a box. Later that week Nadia bought six boxes for about $5 delivered through an online store. Pretty good deal that.

A couple of days go by, and one morning the doorbell rings while I'm making breakfast. I go over and check the window to see who it is, and there's a tall stack of boxes next to the door. I mean TALL, tall like up to my chest tall.

I felt like Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth (film rendition), when he hears a thud in the room next to him and finds a giant gift wrapped box inside. In other words, very surreal.

At first I thought they might not be the swabs, but there were six boxes, and each one had clear print that indicated they were indeed the alcohol swabs Nadia had ordered.

Okay, then they must be over packaged, as Amazon is famous for. Nope. As I moved them inside the house, they were too sturdy and heavy to be just one little box of swabs surrounded by packing peanuts or whatever. Unless they used phone books for padding.

So I opened one up, and found four smaller boxes inside. Eh? I took out one of the smaller boxes, and inside were six boxes of alcohol swabs.

"The fuck."

In a fraction of a second the gravity of the situation dawned on me, and the in-laws walked in to find me paused in the exact moment of realisation.

"What's all that?"
"Err, alcohol swabs I think."
"All of that is alcohol swabs? How many did Nadia buy?"
"Six I think... but there must be a mistake. I'll wake up Nadia."

I left the man-high stack of boxes there and ran downstairs to wake her. If you ask Nadia to tell you the story, it's starts with her waking up to find me staring at her all wild eyed.

"How many alcohol swabs did you order?!"
"Shfgu... whaa?"
"Alcohol swabs! You just orderd six, right?"
"hfg... yeah, six... why?"

Since I've got a reputation for being a lying prankster, I make the most serious face I can, and then with the most calm and serious voice I can I say:

"You need to come see this."

We get back upstairs and I count them. Six boxes containing four boxes, which each contain six boxes containing 100 swabs. That's a total of 14,400 alcohol swabs! If we use five a day, and we don't, we'd have enough for almost 8 years.

As Nadia and her parents talk back and forth I start to daydream how it came to be that we were sent this many swabs for $5 delivered. How, in a warehouse somewhere in Virginia, someone's scratching their heads trying to figure out why they're sold out of alcohol swabs already - we stocked up with BOXES of them!

One of my old journals started turning up a 404, and don't ask me why but I narrowed it down to the fact it had 'artician' (as in the art community - [link]) in the title.

I renamed it to 'a r t i c i a n' and it shows up again. I made a new journal named 'artician' and though it showed on my userpage, and in my /journal/ page... it's giving me a 404.

Anyone else seeing this?

edit: turns out spelling it Artician wont trigger the 404. but still... wtf is going on here?

test.

Misleading journal title for the win - I'm talking about the recent Steam sale. I picked up L4D2 (for Nadia mainly she likes killing zombies almost as much as she liked killing me with Depeche Mode), Zombie Driver, Jamestown, and Audiosurf. I already had Terraria, otherwise I would have picked it up on sale too.

Anyone else partake in the steam sale?

---

My fitness/weight loss project is coming along nicely. We didn't have a scale when I began about two months ago, but I estimate I was around 110kg. First weighing read 105-ish, and yesterday I weighed myself and I was 100.6. Aside from stepping on a scale and seeing a number, I've been feeling better and can see the difference.

I've used the new lycra shorts twice now, and they really help. Big time. If you run, or are thinking of running, get some lycra/spandex running shorts! Without wandering into TMI land, lets just say they're a lot more comfortable and let me run without having to constantly adjust things. And no, I don't look like creepy smiling man from my last journal, my shorts have a different design that makes them much like regular boxer briefs.

Oh, another thing - all the running I've been doing on the treadmill has been barefoot. Had some aches and pains in my legs/feet at first, and every now and then I get a blister or two, but otherwise it feels fine. It's how our ancestors used to run after all. Read about it before attempting it though - running barefoot requires a different technique to the heel strike we use when wearing padded runners.

Got some running shorts from Amazon.com today to make all the running I'm doing a bit more comfortable. They've got spandex (aka lycra) in them, and like everything now that wikipedia exists, I had to look it up to see what I could learn about this magical synthetic fibre.

Well. It's about dick and balls apparently, if one of the example photos is anything to go by:

The other day someone I hadn't seen on dA for aaages left a comment on my userpage. Actually, two people I hadn't seen on dA for aaages left comments on my userpage.

I think they're secretly the same person.

Back on topic though: userpage comment archaeology.

~WarthogDemon (one of the someones I hadn't seen on dA for aaages that left a comment on my userpage) asked about one of my old avatars, Claude the French toast.

While I had worn it for quite some time back in the day, I had never submitted it as a deviation. Fixed that:



Claude wasn't originally a piece of French toast. He was just some random animated doodle. The lore that surrounded him was borne out of a series of silly userpage comments, so I thought it'd be fun to track down those comments.

I first started using Claude as my avatar back around November 2003. How many pages of userpage comments would I have to trawl through? Well, it took me until about 240 pages to find the first comments mentioning my avatar as French toast.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the specific conversation that fleshed out the character of Claude. Back in the beginning dA didn't have comment threading as we take for granted today. If someone left a comment on your userpage, you had to go to their userpage to respond. By the end of 2003 we did have a reply button, and comment threading, but we'd become so used to doing things the old way; it was part of our culture really, that it felt dirty to use the new system.

The thought was that, hey, they paid you a visit, return the favour asshole. So for a lot of us, we kept doing things the old way. You can see this in my userpage comments around the end of 2003. I used the reply button on a couple, but for ~Chianti's comment - [link] - I went to her page to reply (found it on page 106 after a bit of digging.)

This fragmented approach to conversations might be why I can't find that original comment that created the Claude mythos. Such a shame.

It's because of moments like this that I don't delete deviations or journals. A lot of it is giggling at silly cat photos, or making up silly back stories for a jiggly French toast man/face/thing. But some of it is stuff I'm proud of, like when we first began skinning dA - [link] - it might seem narcissistic, but that's internet history right there. Even if future historians don't think so, it is to me. Not so much to relive former glory, but at times when I'm not feeling the creative energy I used to have, it's quite the inspiration. A reminder of what I'm capable of.

look at me sound like an old fart. But I've been a part of this damn website for long enough for a child to develop rational thinking - even if Claude's mental development hasn't progressed much since then



So. When was the last time you dived into your digital archives?

I wanted to look up Iron, as in the mineral, as in the vitamin.

The main article didn't immediately look like it had what I wanted, so I went to the disambiguation page. Since the main article actually had what I wanted, I couldn't find what I wanted on the disambiguation page.

This meant I had the pleasure of scrolling down and finding that there's such a thing as Breast Ironing.

...but it wasn't what I expected

Yerr. Silly title is me being silly.

So what's going on with me?

I'm exercising throughout the day. Nothing really structured, a bunch of callisthenics. Minimum ~500 calories on the treadmill through the day. Being more disciplined with what I eat. Since I came to the US my fitness had gone down and my body fat had gone up. After just a couple of weeks of work I'm back to where I was, and I'm going to work at it until I'm in better shape than I've ever been. I thought it'd be harder than this, but there's a satisfaction to the exertion.

Related, for the first time since we moved into this house I walked to the supermarket. We'd only ever driven, and it seemed to be outside walking distance... but I was wrong. Very awesome not to have to start the car up just to go get a couple of things.

The first trip there was with my nephew. Nadia's sister tore her ACL clean off, and was staying with us while she waited for and recovered from her surgery. They gave her a new ACL from an organ donor. Not sure if that's weird or not. Anyhow, the kids were staying with us too, and Yousef has been driving everyone crazy - he's at that age, y'know?

That, and he listens to screamo. Urgh.

When I was a kid I'd go apeshit bananas ADHD when I ate foods with certain additives or colours, and the only way I could calm down was to walk it off. So I figured I'd try takign the big man for a walk. We got to aforementioned supermarket, got some drinks, and kept walking.

We ended up finding the dump zone for all the construction work in the area. Big piles of broken concrete drain pipe. Twisted rebar. Mountains of gravel... and more. Gotta go back with my camera some time.

Saw one of my older journal CSS gadgets (image lists) on dA today, and for a fraction of a second I was actually wondering where I'd seen it before.

In my defence, it was four years ago.